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USA 1997

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Scud Race Plus

スカッドレース プラス

Sega Model 3 (1997)

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refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

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If you’re LGBT reblog and tag with your opinion on beer.

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Midtown Madness 2 (2000)

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The Thief series was created by Looking Glass Studios back when game studios would calmly create whole new genres of games before then jumping to an entirely different genre for their next title

After playing the original demo I was completely enamoured by the fictional world Garrett (the playable protagonist) inhabited. Even at the time the game engine had lower polygon counts (i.e. detail) than other games, but decisions like using motion capture for the movement of characters in the game really helped sell the realism of a world inhabited by living people.

Another aspect that felt a cut above the composition was the use of audio. Music was used very sparingly and instead ambient sounds came to the forefront. Better yet was the use of Aureal A3D technology to better simulate how sounds would propagate in 3D space.

The result of all this craftsmanship was a game that felt so very immersive and it's one I've revisited many times over the years.

One of the reasons I built my new Pentium III 600MHz Windows 98SE machine was so that I could install an Aureal A3D Vortex 2 audio card to use with compatible games.

At the time EAX was quite a basic technology that would simply add effects like reverb when a character ended a certain location. Whereas A3D would realistically calculate reverb through sound reflections within a given 3D space.

As much as I enjoyed Thief 1 at the time, for me Thief 2 was the highpoint of the series. This was mainly due to a reduction in the supernatural elements in the first game and instead a focus on the purity of being a thief in realistic environments.

As I look at my original Thief CD jewel case it takes me back to when I first purchased it at a local independent game shop. I was around the age of 18 and was finally earning enough money to indulge my love of technology and games. Sadly I've long since got rid of the bulky cardboard boxes that and other games came in, but I'm happy I've still retained this part of my connection my past.

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Maximum Linux - October 1999 Penguin Got Game

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There is an open source space trading simulator game based off the 1984 game Elite and its 1993 successor Frontier: Elite II (two of the most ambitious games of all time).

It is a fully functional experience which has been in continuous development since 2008. Coming out of the development of GLFrontier in 2005, a reverse-engineered version of FE2 rewritten to utilize OpenGL for rendering its 3d graphics.

Just like the games it is based on it takes place in an expansive galaxy with hundreds (In FE2's case a near-infinite number) of systems utilizing a what it describes as a realistic, albeit rudimentary, newtonian physics system for space flight and air travel.

Github

Website

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For Later..... Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (2019)

Bought this on the Steam sale for $10. I plan on getting around to it after finishing Gabriel Knight 3 (1999), if I don't start playing it parallel to GK3. I felt like I'd maybe been too mean to the visual novel as a genre in the past and I think I found a new lens through which to give them a fairer chance.

Enclosed: overly long/pretentious/disorganized ramblings about visual novels, adventure games, and video games as a narrative medium.

I think I toiled for a bit too long over the word "novel" in "visual novel." I long dismissed the VN genre as lacking literary merit while completely forgetting that, unlike an actual book, text does not comprise the whole of a VN. There's more to it here: images, sounds, music, possibly player agency, possibly more tactile gameplay segments, etc. Basically I was a huge jerk who was way too far up my own ass. Bad habit.

But admission aside, I still really don't think most video games tell good stories. I don't mean that from like a John Carmack perspective. I'm not a wholesale video game story hater. I don't think video games can't or shouldn't try to tell good stories. It's just that I think they generally don't. Most video games regarded by more mainstream-leaning outlets/influencers as having "good stories" a) don't, and b) do absolutely nothing to flex the unique properties of video games as a narrative medium. The Last of Us (2013), for example, is not only an obvious Hollywood drama pastiche—one that would have been rightly shat on had it been a movie—but its gameplay is so railroaded that it doesn't even have anything to lose by not being a video game. While I don't think the story of TLOU would have been compelling in any medium, nothing about it tells me it had to be a video game.

But then, sometimes (and this is a big fucking sometimes), there's something like Planescape: Torment (1999). Torment really would not have worked as anything other than a video game. Its body of dialogue is too expansive and too nonlinear for anything else to really contain it. You could have made it a choose-your-own-adventure book, but it'd probably be the size of multiple phonebooks. But you wouldn't really want it to be a CYOA book because then you'd lose out on the computer role-playing aspects. Its combat and encounter design leave a lot to be desired, but you get some choices as to how you develop your character (not just narratively, but also in gameplay terms, as you can customize your stats and equipment and change between different character classes), and you get to explore beautiful pre-rendered maps with tons of NPCs to talk to and sidequests to undertake. And thankfully, the mountains of text are worth it. Planescape: Torment has an exceptional story. It's the first name that comes to mind when I think about well-done stories in this medium.

Over the past few days I watched a friend play through The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery [aka Gabriel Knight 2] (1995). As I talked about in my previous post, I played through it last year and it proved to me that I could get into a point-and-click adventure game. Watching my friend play it let me refresh my memory of its story and it had me thinking: "I like this story, but I don't think I would like it if it wasn't in a video game." I think I meant a few different things by that. For starters, its campy FMV presentation is just too charming to lose, and you obviously couldn't get that in a book (ironically, there is a novelization of the game, written by Jane Jensen herself). In addition, it was pretty fun to walk around the environments and click on stuff and hear the protagonists' thoughts on whatever you clicked on.

But most importantly is something I took way too long to realize. As in, I'm just recently consciously thinking about it: I just don't look for these kinds of stories in books or movies. Planescape: Torment is a dark fantasy story, and Gabriel Knight 2 is a supernatural detective story. On the other hand, I almost never read genre fiction. I think my dumb ass really was looking for Pynchon or Cheever in video games. In hindsight, I feel so pretentious. Like, of course I'm not going to find Ingmar Bergman outside the cinema. Of course I'm not going to find Warren Spector outside of video games.

So that's a whole list of clicking points that led to me deciding to give the visual novel another shot. I should just make sure to treat them as adventure games; not as novels. I know that in Japan there is a split between NVL (VNs that feature little to no interaction) and ADV (VNs that tend to have more interactive sections, like puzzles/minigames/quick-time events/etc) titles, but for my own health I'm going to interpret the VN genre as a whole as a subgenre of the much broader "adventure game" category.

And so, this Steam Summer Sale, I bought Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (2019), and now that I've left all that "muh literary merit" bullshit behind me I actually have no expectations going in. Despite its popularity, I know basically nothing about this series. I know you play a defense attorney named Phoenix Wright, I know the first entry placed pretty high on Adventure Gamer's 2011 All-Time Top 100, and I know that almost everyone I know who has played these games is almost fanatically in love with the franchise. I hope I enjoy it as well.

Thank you to anyone who read all the way through this. I probably should've said this at the end of my last post as well, since I think that one's even longer. I didn't really do any editing; this isn't an essay. I'm just using Tumblr as a means to publicly vomit walls of text at my screen. Besides, sometimes it's fun to just spill a bunch of thoughts without any concern for organization.

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Gabriel Knight 3: Day 1 Complete

After my initial post about Gabriel Knight 3 (which was itself just me restating a few Tweets I made about the game), I figured I'd keep writing about it until I'm finished with it. I guess this will be like a really abridged camcorder let's play, but maybe less focused on the game itself (For example, I don't think I want to reveal too many huge plot spoilers.) and more on my own thoughts on the game and maybe also the graphic adventure genre as a whole.

Before I start, maybe I should first talk about my own history with the point and click adventure genre. It's not very long. When I was a kid I played a little bit of Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor (2004) with my mom, and I thought it was really difficult and none of the puzzles made any sense and then I went back to playing Battlefield 1942 (2002). Not long later, after getting GameTap (points to anyone else who had it), I tried a few of the many old adventure games on the service, such as the first couple King's Quest games and some of the Myst games. You could probably guess how well those went for me.

It wasn't until last year, at a point in time in which I really felt like I had played everything I thought I wanted to play, that I decided I'd give the genre another shot. It was a good opportunity to explore what I had realized was a huge blind spot; I love old PC games, and this was once a marquee genre for the platform. The first game I played in this excursion was LucasArts's Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993). I just thought it was okay. I really liked Sam and Max as characters, but I wasn't that invested in the world they inhabited or the mystery the game saw them solving. In addition, I really couldn't recall a single puzzle in the whole game. That might be a good thing, since that means none of them must have been particularly infuriating. Next, I tried Full Throttle (1995), also by LucasArts. I didn't finish it because basically nothing about its story, world, characters, or gameplay grabbed me. It's allegedly extremely short, so for all I know I might have seen the majority of the game before quitting.

Up next was Sierra's The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (1995), which I'm just going to refer to as Gabriel Knight 2 or GK2. I was interested in it because it seemed like the polar opposite of the other two games I played. For one, it was by the other major graphic adventure publisher. But it obviously ran way deeper than that. GK2 was very different in terms of tone and presentation as well, being a dark paranormal mystery in a contemporary setting, played by live actors.

I ended up finding GK2 to be immensely charming. Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura, the game's dual protagonists, quickly became two of my favorite characters in the medium. The writing and acting were campy, but nothing felt forced or insincere. A couple of its puzzles were pretty frustrating, but they were worth powering through to see the next part of the story. Also, it had to be among the most homoerotic games to be released by a major publisher in the 1990s. Metal Gear Solid wishes. If you're reading this and you haven't played it, I highly recommend it.

Which finally brings me to Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (1999). I first tried it right after finishing 2, but was scared off by its interface, which may have been designed by aliens. I'm not going to retread what I talked about in my initial post about the game, but trust me: it's fucking weird.

One of the most confusing things about GK3 is how it starts. The game's opening cutscene gives absolutely no context as to why Gabriel is getting his ass on a train in France. That's because the actual intro is in a prologue comic, which was included in the game's box, but bizarrely isn't included as a digital extra in the Steam/GOG re-releases of the game. Thankfully, it has been uploaded elsewhere.

Heartbreakingly, Dean Erickson did not return to reprise his role as Gabriel. Instead, Tim Curry—who voiced him in the first game—was brought back to play the protagonist. Erickson knocked it out of the park in GK2. He had a more convincing Louisiana accent than Tim Curry ever will, and he was significantly more capable of portraying Gabriel at his most serious. Curry's portrayal, on the other hand, is really over-the-top. Unfortunately, Joanne Takahashi, who did a fantastic job as Grace in 2, didn't return either. I can't comment on her replacement (Charity James) just yet, as Grace has had very little presence so far in my playthrough.

As I said in my initial post about the game, Gabriel Knight 3 used a completely original engine. It was probably going to be used for more than just this game, but GK3 ended up being Sierra's final adventure game. It's a shame because it's a really fascinating engine that, weird interface aside, opens up a level of fully 3D exploration that other graphic adventure games didn't have. Instead of pre-rendered backgrounds, everything is 3D: characters, environments, and all the little objects that inhabit them. The level of detail is pretty surprising, as some of these areas are quite big. You have a freely controllable camera that moves independently of the player character. In the two images below, you can see the same area through two cameras. The first is the default angle you see when you load into this area. In the second, I pulled the camera back as far as it let me:

Obviously, the ground textures have not aged all that well, and some of the skyboxes depicting distant mountains don't look too great either. The level of detail, however, is pretty impressive. All signs and posters in the world are fully legible, and the texture filtering is good enough that they actually still look very smooth when you zoom in on them. I should've taken some pictures of them to illustrate this.

The interiors look (and run) way better, and they also do a better job of showing off the level of detail this engine is capable of. You can pick up that crumpled piece of paper in front of the trash can. It's so useless that it doesn't even get added to your inventory, but it still has a whole animation and voiceover dedicated to it.

Gabriel Knight 3's game sections are divided very concretely. The game's "chapters" are presented as days, which are split blocks of hours. For example, Day 1 of the game is split into 10AM-12PM, 12PM-2PM, 2PM-4PM, 4PM-6PM, and 6PM-10PM. Thankfully, there is no time limit or real-time clock. Instead, essential story progress is what moves you from one time block to the next. As the title suggests, I just finished Day 1 of the game.

Day 1 has the notorious cat hair mustache puzzle. It is, to put it lightly, fucking stupid. To make matters worse, it is the first major puzzle in the game. I can't even imagine how many people bought this game in 1999 only to never see past this part.

While its tale of vampires, missing babies, secret societies, hidden treasures, and seriously unconvincing Scottish accents has me intrigued so far, GK3 lacks the camp charm of its predecessor. Jane Jensen can obviously still write convincing characters, and her sense of humor still shines through occasionally, but this game is way more stone-faced than 2 so far. But all in all, so far so good. If I can get through a puzzle so bad it has its own Wikipedia article, I should be able to comfortably get through the rest of Gabriel Knight 3.

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1999

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Gabriel Knight 3

Picking up from where my free trial of Twitter left off, here are some truly awful photos of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (1999) running on my Windows 98 machine. Adventure games have always been a blind spot for me, but last year I played through The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (1995) and it really turned my opinion around on the genre, as I had done so right after playing through a couple of LucasArts adventures that I didn't really dig. While The Beast Within (GK2) was presented via live actors on prerendered backgrounds, Sierra made a proprietary fully 3D adventure engine for GK3, with one of the most bizarre interfaces I have ever experienced in any video game ever. It feels like a simulation of an out-of-body experience. It is like you are playing as a ghost possessing a guy. You really should check out video footage of the game to see what I mean. The game was a commercial flop, and was Sierra's final adventure game. It also had a mixed critical reception, and is mostly remembered for having a puzzle so ridiculous it has its own Wikipedia article. I'm only two chapters in (right before the notorious puzzle in question) but so far I'm invested in its world and story, despite its completely insane interface.

Also, some PC info as an aside: this computer has a Pentium III 800, a 16MB 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (with EAX support!), 192MB of RAM, a 40GB IDE hard drive whose manufacturer I can't remember off the top of my head, and a CD-ROM drive that refuses to open sometimes. I have a driver installed to enable USB flash drive support, so I usually load ISO images into Daemon Tools instead of wrestling with the optical drive.

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I don't fucking believe this.

Twitter got so bad it filtered me back to here. That said I guess this is a good excuse to start actually writing for an audience of more than just myself more often.